ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies

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Batman has contributed more than its fair share to the
'darkness that hangs over contemporary culture like a picturesque
pall. 'Dark' designates both a highly marketable aesthetic style and
an ethical, or rather anti-ethical, stance, a kind of designer
nihilism whose chief theoretical proposition is the denial of the
possibility of the Good. Gotham, particularly as re-invented by
Frank Miller in the eighties, is, along with Gibson's Sprawl and
Ridley Scott's LA, one of the chief geomythic sources of this
trend.[1]

Miller's legacy for comics has been ambivalent at
best. Reflect on the fact that his rise coincides with the almost
total failure of superhero comics to produce any new characters with
mythic resonance.[2] The 'maturity' for which Miller has been
celebrated corresponds with comics' depressive and introspective
adolescence, and for him, as for all adolescents, the worst sin is
exuberance. Hence his trademark style is deflationary, taciturn:
consider all those portentous pages stripped of dialogue in which
barely anything happens and contrast them with the crazed
effervescence of the typical Marvel page in the 60s. Miller's pages
have all the brooding silence of a moody fifteen-year old boy. We are
left in no doubt: the silence signifies.

Miller traded on a disingenuous male adolescent desire to
both have comics and to feel superior to them. But his
demythologization, inevitably, produced only a new mythology, one that
posed as more sophisticated than the one it has displaced but is in
fact an utterly predictable world of 'moral ambivalence' in which
'there are only shades of grey'. There are reasons for being highly
sceptical about Miller's bringing into comics a noir-lite cartoon
nihilist bleakness that has long been a cliche in films and books. The
'darkness' of this vision is in fact curiously reassuring and
comforting, and not only because of the sentimentality it can never
extirpate. (Miller's 'hard-bitten' world reminds me not so much of
noir, but of the simulation of noir in Dennis Potter's Singing
Detective, the daydream-fantasies of a cheap hack, thick with
misognyny and misanthropy and cooked in intense self-loathing.)

It is hardly surprising that Miller's model of realism came
to the fore in comics at the time when Reaganomics and Thatcherism
were presenting themselves as the only solutions to America and
Britain's ills. Reagan and Thatcher claimed to have 'delivered us from
the "fatal abstractions" inspired by the "ideologies of the
past"' (Badiou, 2005, 7). They had awoken us from the supposedly
flawed, dangerously deluded dreams of collectivity and re-acquainted
us with the 'essential truth' that individual human beings can only be
motivated by their own animal interests.

These propositions belong to an implicit ideological
framework we can call Capitalist Realism. On the basis of a series of
assumptionshuman beings are irredeemably self-interested, (social)
Justice can never be achievedCapitalist Realism projects a vision
of what is 'Possible'.

For Alain Badiou, the rise to dominance of this restricted
sense of possibility must be regarded as a period of 'Restoration'. As
Badiou explained in an interview with Cabinet magazine, 'in France,
"Restoration" refers to the period of the return of the King, in 1815,
after the Revolution and Napoleon. We are in such a period. Today we
see liberal capitalism and its political system, parlimentarianism, as
the only natural and acceptable solutions' (Badiou, Cox, Whalen,
2001/02). According to Badiou, the ideological defence for these
political configurations takes the form of a lowering of expectations.

'We live in a contradiction: a brutal state of affairs,
profoundly inegalitarianwhere all existence is evaluated in terms of
money aloneis presented to us as ideal. To justify their
conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really
call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that
all the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a
condition of perfect Goodness. But we're lucky that we don't live in a
condition of Evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But it's better than
the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it's not criminal
like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don't
make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis
with our airplanes, but we don't cut their throats with machetes like
they do in Rwanda, etc.' (ibid)

Capitalism and liberal democracy are 'ideal' precisely in the sense
that they are 'the best that one can expect', that is to say, the
least worst.[3]
This chimes with Miller's rendition of the hero in The Dark
Knight Returns and Year One: Batman may be
authoritarian, violent and sadistic, but in a world of endemic
corruption, he is the least worst option. (Indeed, such traits may
turn out to be necessary in conditions of ubiquitous venality.) Just
as Badiou suggests, in Miller's Gotham it is no longer possible to
assume the existence of Good. Good has no positive
presencewhat Good there has to be defined by reference to a
self-evident Evil which it is not. Good, that is to say, is the
absence of an Evil whose existence is self-evident.

The fascination of the latest cinema version of Batman,
Batman Begins (directed by Christopher Nolan) consists in its
mitigated return to the question of Good. The film still belongs to
the .Restoration. to the degree that it is unable to imagine a
possible beyond capitalism: as we shall see, it is a specific mode of
capitalismpost-Fordist finance capitalthat is demonised in
Batman Begins, not capitalism per se. Yet the film leaves open the
possibilitity of agency which Capitalist Realism forecloses.

Nolan's revisiting of Batman is not a re-invention but a
reclaiming of the myth, a grand syncresis that draws upon the whole
history of the character.[4] Gratifyingly, then, Batman Begins is not
about 'shades of grey' at all, but rather about competing versions of
the Good. In Batman Begins, Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne
is haunted by a superfluity of Fathers (and a near absence of mothers:
his mother barely says a word), each with their own account of the
Good. First, there is his biological father, Thomas Wayne, a
rose-tinted, soft focus moral paragon, the very personification of
philanthropic Capital, the 'man who built Gotham'. In keeping with the
Batman myth established in the 30's Detective Comics,
Wayne Pere is killed in a random street robbery, surviving only as a
moral wraith tormenting the conscience of his orphaned son. Second,
there is R'as Al Ghul, who in Nolan's film is Wayne's hyperstitional[5]
mentor-guru, a
Terroristic figure who represents a ruthless ethical code completely
opposed to the benevolent paternalism of Thomas Wayne. Bruce is
assisted in the struggle (fought out in his own pysche) between these
two Father figures by a third, Michael Caine's Alfred, the
'maternal' carer who offers the young Bruce unconditional love.

The struggle between Fathers is doubled by the conflict
between Fear and Justice that has been integral to the Batman mythos
since it first appeared in 1939. The challenge for Bruce Wayne in
Batman Begins is not only to best Fear, as wielded by the
Miller-invented crime boss Falcone and the Scarecrow with his
'weaponized hallucinogens', but to identify Justice, which, as the
young Wayne must learn, cannot be equated with revenge.

From the start, the Batman mythos has been about the
pressing of Gothic Fear into the service of heroic Justice. Echoing
the origin story as recounted in Detective Comics in
1939, which has Bruce famously declare, "Criminals are a superstitious
cowardly lot, so my disguise must be able to strike terror into their
hearts", Nolan's Wayne dedicates himself to turning fear against those
who use it. Yet Nolan's version makes the origin story both more
Oedipal and more anti-Oedipal than it appeared in Detective
Comics. In the original comic, Bruce settles upon the name 'Batman'
when a single Bat flies into his room. Nolan's rendering of Batman's
primal scene is significantly different, in that it takes place
outside the family home, beyond the realm of the Oedipal, in a cave in
the capacious grounds of Wayne Manor, and not with a single bat but
with a whole (Deleuzian) pack.[6] The name 'Batman', with its suggestions of
becoming-animal, does indeed have a Deleuzoguattarian resonance. Yet
the proximity of Batman's name to that of some of Freud's case
histories'Ratman' especially, but also 'Wolfman'is no
accident either. Batman remains a thoroughly Oedipal figure (as
Batman Begins leaves us no doubt).[7]Batman Begins
re-binds the becoming-animal with the Oedipal by having Bruce's fear
of bats figure as a partial cause of his
parents' death. Bruce is at the opera when the sight of bat-like
figures on stage drives him to nag his parents until they leave the
theatre and are killed.

The Gothic and the Oedipal elements of the Batman mythos
were entwined immediately, on the two pages of Detective
Comics on which Batman's origin was first told. As Kim Newman
identifies, Wayne's epiphanic revelation that 'I must be a terrible
creature of the night... I shall become a BAT... a weird figure of the
night' contains 'subliminal quotes from Dracula
("creatures of the night, what sweet music they make") and The
Cabinet of Dr Caligari ("you shall become Caligari") (Newman,
20).[8] These panels
follow three at the top of the page where the shocked Bruce sees the
bodies of his parents ('father, mother ... Dead, they're dead') and
'swears by [their deaths] to avenge [them] by spending the rest of my
life warring on all criminals'. Batman is self-consciously
imaginedand self-createdas a Gothic monster, a 'weird figure
of the dark', but one who will use 'the night' against the criminals
who habitually hide in it.

If Batman was heavily indebted to German
Expressionismvia Universal's horror picturesso, famously,
was film noir, which emerged, like Batman, in the late 30s and early
40s. (As we've already seen, Miller's rendition of Batman can be seen
as in many ways a postmodern investigation of this parallel.) Remarks
made by Alenka Zupancic suggest a possible hidden source for the
complicity between Batman and noir: Oedipus again. '[I]n contrast to
Hamlet,' Zupancic writes, 'the story of Oedipus has often
been said to belong to the whodunnit genre. Some have gone even
further, and seen in Oedipus the King the prototype of
the noir genre. Thus Oedipus the King appeared
in the 'noir series' of French publisher Gallimard ('translated from
the myth' by Didier Lamaison)' (Zupancic, 245).[9] Batman, the
superhero-detective, walks in the footsteps of the first detective,
Oedipus.

Ultimately, however, the problem for Batman is that he remains an
Oedipus who not gone through the Oedipus complex. As Zupancic points
out, the Oedipus complex turns on the discrepancy between the
Symbolic and the empirical father: the Symbolic Father is the
embodiment of the Symbolic order itself, solemn carrier of Meaning and
bearer of the Law; the empirical father is the 'simple, more or less
decent man'. For Zupancic, the standard rendering of the 'typical
genesis of subjectivity' has it that the child first of all encounters
the Symbolic father and then comes to learn that this mighty figure is
a 'simple, more or less decent man'. Yet, as Zupancic establishes,
this trajectory is the exact inverse of the one which Oedipus
pursues. Oedipus begins by encountering an 'rude old man at the
crossroads' and only later does he learn that this 'simple man', this
'vulgar creature', was the Father. Thus 'Oedipus travels the path of
initiation (of 'symbolization') in reverse and, in so doing, he
encounters the radical contingency of the Meaning borne by the
symbolic.' (Zupancic, 193)

For Bruce Wayne, though, there is no discrepancy at all
between the Symbolic and the empirical. Thomas Wayne's early death
means that he is frozen in his young son's psyche as the mighty
emissary of the Symbolic; he is never 'desublimated' into a 'simple
man', but remains a moral exemplarindeed he is the
representative of Law as such, who must be avenged but who can never
be equalled. In Batman Begins, it is the intervention of
R'as Al Ghul which prompts an Oedipal crisis. The young Wayne is
convinced that his father's death is his fault, but Al Ghul tries to
convince him that his parents' death is his father's responsibility
because the good-natured and liberal Thomas Wayne did not know how to
Act; he was a weak-willed failure. Yet Bruce refuses to go through
this initiation and retains loyalty to the 'Name of the Father' while
Al Ghul remains a figure of excess and Evil.

The question Al Ghul poses to Bruce is: are you, with your
conscience, your respect for life, too weak-willed, too frightened to
do what is Necessary? Can you Act? Wayne is forced to decide: is Al
Ghul what he claims to be, the ice cold instrument of impersonal
Justice, or its grotesque parody? The ultimate Evil in the film turns
out to originate from Ghul's excessive zeal, not from some hoaky
diabolism nor from some psycho-biographical happenstance.[10]

In this respect, it is the film that Zizek wanted
Revenge of the Sith to be: a film, that is to say, which
dares to hypothesise that Evil might result from an excess of
Good. For Zizek, 'Anakin [Skywalker] should have become a monster out
his very excessive attachment with seeing Evil everywhere and fighting
it' but '[i]nstead of focusing on Anakin's hubris as an overwhelming
desire to intervene, to do Good, to go to the end for those he loves
and thus fall to the Dark Side, Anakin is simply shown as an
indecisive warrior who is gradually sliding into Evil by giving way to
the temptation of Power, by falling under the spell of the evil
Emperor.' (Zizek, 2005)

In parallel with Zizek's reading of Revenge of the
Sith,Batman Begins' treatment of the question of
the Fatherwho is the father?is doubled by the
looming (omni-)presence of finance capital, and the issue of what is
to be done about it. In Batman's universe of course, 'the Name of the
Father'Wayneis also the name of a capitalist
enterprise. The takeover of Wayne Industries by shareholder capital
means that Thomas's name has been stolen. Consequently, Bruce Wayne's
struggle against finance capital is also, inevitably, an attempt to
restore the besmirched Name of the Father. Since Wayne Industries is
at the heartliterally and figurativelyof the city,
post-Fordist Gotham finds itself as blighted as the Sphinx-cursed
Thebes. Its infrastructure rotten, its civil society disintegrated,
Gotham is in the grip of a Depression and a crime wave, both of which
are attributed to the newly predatory, delocalised Capital that now
has control of the Wayne corporation. The impact of finance capital is
given a more personal narrative focus through the character of the
kindly Lucius Fox (another candidate for Father surrogate)[11] who is degraded
by the new regime. The implication is that this state of rottenness
can only be rectified once the name of the Father resumes its rights.

It is in its treatment of capitalism that Batman Begins
is at its most intriguingly contradictory. In part, this can be
attributed to the effects of attempting to retrofit the 1930s core
narrative engine into a twenty-first century vehicle: the reference to
the Depression is a clear Thirties echo, setting up a disjunction with
a contemporary USA that has enjoyed an unprecedented period of
economic success. In keeping with capitalism itself,
Deleuze-Guattari's 'motley painting of everything that ever was',
Nolan's Gotham is an admixture of the medieval and the
ultra-contemporary, of the American, the European and the Third
World. It resembles at once the crooked steeples and spires of German
expressionism and the favela-sprawls of cyberpunk:[12] the nightmare of
Old Europe erupting in the heart of the American Megalopolis.

In a fascinating reading of Batman Begins,
China Miéville argues that the film's anti-capitalism cashes out as an
advocacy of fascism. The film, he writes,

is about fascism's self-realisation, and the only
struggle it undergoes is to admit its own necessity. BB argues for the
era of the absolute(ist) corporation against the 'postmodern' social
dilutions of shareholder capitalism (perceived here in old-school
corporate paranoia as a kind of woolly weakness), let alone against
the foolishness of those well-meaning liberal rich who don't
understand that their desire to travel with the poor and working class
are the *causes* of social conflict, because The Rich Man At His
Garden The Poor Man At His Gate, and that the blurring of those
boundaries confuses the bestial instincts of the sheep-masses. The
film argues quite explicitly (in what's obviously, in its raised-train
setting, structured as a debate with Spiderman 2, a stupid but
good-hearted film that thinks people are basically decent) that masses
are dangerous unless terrorised into submission (Spidey falls among
the masses - they nurture him and make sure he's ok. Bats falls among
them - they are a murderous and bestial mob because they are not being
*effectively scared enough*). The final way of *solving* social
catastrophe is ... by the demolition of the mass transit system that
ruined everything by literally raised the poor and put them among the
rich: travelling together, social-democratic welfarism as opposed to
trickle-downism is a nice dream but leads to social collapse, and if
left unchecked terrorism that sends transit systems careering through
the sky into tall buildings in the middle of New York-style
cities9/11 as caused by the crisis of *excessive social
solidarity*, the arrogance of masses *not being sufficiently terrified
of their shepherds*.[13]

In all a film that says social stratification is necessary
to prevent tragedy, and that it should be policed by terrorising the
plebeians, for the sake of corporations which if there is a happy
ending ... will end up back in the hands of a single enlightened despot,
hurrah, to save us from the depredations of consensus.

There is no doubt that the film poses finance capital as
a problem that will be solved by the return of a re-personalised
capital, with 'the enlightened despot' Bruce taking on the role of the
dead Thomas. It is equally clear, as we've already seen, that
Batman Begins is unable to envisage an alternative to
capitalism itself, favouring instead a nostalgic rewind to prior forms
of capitalism. (One of the structuring fantasies of the film is the
notion that crime and social disintegration are exclusively the
results of capitalist failure, rather than the inevitable
accompaniments to capitalist 'success'.)

However, we must distinguish between corporate capitalism
and fascism if only because the film makes such a point of doing
so. The fascistic option is represented not by Wayne-Batman but by
R'as al Ghul. It is al Ghul who plots the total razing of a Gotham he
characterizes as irredeemably corrupt. Wayne's language is not that of
renewal-through-destruction (and here Schumpterian capitalism and
fascism, in most other respects entirely opposed, find themselves in
sympathy) but of philanthropic meliorism. (It should also be noted
that the masses who, in a pointed reference to Romero's Living
Dead films, threaten to consume and destroy Batman are under
the influence of the Scarecrow's 'weaponized hallucinogens' when they
attempt to dismember him, although this image of the masses no doubt
tell us more about the political unconscious of the film-makers than
it does about that of the masses.)

If the film's handling of capitalism is incoherent, in what
does its challenge to Capitalist Realism consist? It is to be found
not at the level of politics but in its account of ethics, agency and
subjectivity. Zizek's classic account of ideology in The Sublime
Object of Ideology turns on the difference between belief and
action. At the level of belief, key capitalist ideascommodities
are animate; capital has a quasi-natural statusare repudiated
but it is precisely the ironic distance from such notions that allows
us to act as if they are true. The disavowal of the beliefs
allows us to perform the actions. Ideology, then, depends upon the
conviction that what 'really matters' is what we are, rather than what
we do, and that 'what we are' is defined by an 'inner essence'. In
terms of contemporary American culture, this plays out in the
'therapeutic' idea that we can remain a 'good person' regardless of
what we do.

The film's principal ethical lesson presents a reversal of
this ideological conviction. In Wayne's struggle to differentiate
justice from revenge, revenge is personified by the uncompromising
R'as al Ghul, while justice is represented by the assistant District
Attorney, Rachel Dawes. Dawes is given the film's crucial
(anti-therapeutic) slogan, 'It's not who you are inside that counts,
it's what you do that makes you what you are.' The Good is
possible, but not without Decision and the Act. In reinforcing this
message, Batman Begins restores to the hero an
existentialist drama that puts to flight not only Capitalist Realist
nihilism, but also the niggling, knowing sprites of postmodern
reflexivity[14]
that have sucked his blood for way too long.

Notes

[1] For a summary of
the ethical assumptions of this world, look no further than K W
Jeter's Noir (a novel that is heavily indebted to both
Gibson and Blade Runner). Jeter has his hardboiled
novelist, Turbiner, define the essence of noir as follows: 'The
looks, the darkness, the shadows, all those trite rain-slick
streetsthat was the least of it. That had nothing to do with
it. ... It's betrayal ... That's what it's always been. That's what
makes it so realistic, even when it is at its most dreamlike and
shabby, when it feels like it's happening on another planet. The one
we lost and can't remember, but we can see it when we close our
eyes...' (192) For an (unfavourable) comparison of Miller's
Sin City with 40s noir, see Patterson, 2005.

[2] Alan Moore is an
interesting parallel case to Miller. Moore, too, made his name with
comics that put superheroes in a more 'realistic' context. He seemed
similarly ambivalent about the superhero genre, drawn to work within
it but also driven by a desire to reform and to some extent
demythologize it. However, Moore's more recent workon The
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and
Prometheahas explicitly dealt with the concept of
mythologization (although, naturally, this is quite different from
actually producing a character that attains a mythological
status). Moore also retains a place for a kind of egalitarian critique
of State power which is lacking in Miller: see for instance his
depiction of aristocratic corruption and conspiracy in From
Hell.

[3] Otherwise,
Badiou would be contradicting himself, claiming on the one hand that
capitalism is 'ideal' and that it destroys any reference to the ideal.

[4] As Newman's
piece establishes, with a detailed scholarly survey of the origin of
the film's characters and set pieces.

[6] This modification
is in fact prompted by Miller's Dark Knight Returns.

[7] It is
significant that perhaps the three greatest American
superheroesBatman, Superman, and Spidermanare orphans, but
the Oedipal torment is most intense in Batman (It is displaced in
Spiderman onto his Aunt, the mother-substitute for and to whom he is
eternally responsible, and Uncle, for whose death he feels guilty.)

[8] To these two
references, one must add Wayne Manor itself, whose rambling
quasi-aristocratic splendour echoes Castles Dracula and Frankenstein
(this latter link reinforced by a panel in which Bruce 'prepares
himself for his future career. by becoming a .master scientist.) from
the Universal films of the 30s. But such structures have deeper roots
in American Horror: one cannot but think of the melancholy grandeur of
Poe's House of Usher.

[9] She goes on to
say, 'That which brings the story of Oedipus close to the noir
universe is, of course, the fact that the herothe
detectiveis without knowing it, implicated in the crimes he is
investigating. One could even say that the story of Oedipus lies at
the heart of the 'new wave' of film noirfilms such as
Angel Heart and Blade Runner (the director's
cut), where it emerges at the end that the hero is himself the
criminal he is looking for.' (245-6)

[10] In this
respect, as in so many others, it compares favourably with Tim
Burton's Batman. Burton pioneered a kind of
psycho-biographically-inclined 'Dark-Lite', and his account of the
Joker's originman falls into bath of acid and goes
psychotictraded in the cheapest and shallowest
psychobiographical cliche.

[11] He was also,
according to Newman, 'perhaps the first upper middle-class black character
in comics.' (Newman, 21)

[12] Which suggests, perhaps,
a looping of cyberpunk (to which Batman in many ways now belongs) back
to (one of) its origins in German Expressionism.

[13] Newman
also spotted a 9/11 parallel: 'Batman Begins finally
feeds back into the the world of 2005, even as it picks up threads
from 1939 and 1986. Fear (phobos), the limited realm of the
bat-phobic Bruce and phobia-expert Crane, has been subsumed by terror
(deimos). This America is riven by injustice . and is haunted
by a fanatic eastern sect with a charismatic but impossible-to-catch
figurehead bent on crashing a mode of transport into a skyscraper to
trigger an explosion of panic that will destroy society.' (Newman, 21)

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